Avoid Dysentery And Acquire Wealth In Pioneers

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Ye olde gaming about ye olde times. Pioneers is a 16th century four-colour turn-based exploration survival RPG. It has more genres than colours. I’ll bet you couldn’t make an Unreal 4 game with four colours. The fonts alone in that engine alone need a GeForce Titan to be rendered. But I digress, which is appropriate because Pioneers is a (currently) free indie game about exploration. Which, when you think about it, are nothing but well-funded digressions.
You’ll be part of an adventuresome crew, heading off into the ocean to see what sort of challenges the game will throw up at you. The early version here only has a couple of islands, but the promise is that of a world to explore. You’ll build a crew, buy what you need, grab a ship and then work on some quests. You could be heading out to uncover the mystery or missing explorers, or on a mapping mission. Whatever it is, it’ll lead you to islands fraught with danger. It’s not a nice place, and wolves, bears, even tribesmen will be out to get you. And those tribes don’t speak your language, so you might not know about it until you’re gutted.

I’ve only spent a few minutes to verify it’s not a secret virus that’ll replace Chrome with Internet Explorer – though that would be an apposite swap – and to have a small wander through the tutorial and opening sections. It’s all neat and charming, and would definitely make Adam rub his thighs. It’s early alpha, so there’s a fair number of things that will puzzle you if you don’t pay attention to the tutorial, and then there are a number of explanatory mis-steps. A lot of times it asks you to do something without telling you how to, which is a huge failing of a section that’s main purpose is tells you how to do things. But I muddled through, and I’m pretty stupid. Beyond that there’s definitely a nasty little adventure wrapped up in cute pixels. Observe this video through a telescope for maximum effect.

The alpha is a test-bed, and the developer will eventually ask for doubloons. Until then, it’s yours for free.

35 Comments

It is immensely difficult, but I believe it’s still within realm of possibility. There is black and brown. There is red for blodo. And the fourth color is the problem all the developers struggle with. But it is possible to add it too. Just look to Deus Ex 3 with its oranges, or Fallout 3 with its greens!

A lot of old graphics styles capture things I don’t think photorealism ever will. System Shock 1, a lot of the early 3d ps1 games etc. They’re all more terrifying or mysterious or whatever than any modern games have ever been.

DF is actually quite colorful, the plants and stone are already varied, and then there’s blood, water, and magma. And on the note of blood, some creatures have different colored blood! With the help of a wounded troll you can paint the floors blue, or with the Hidden Fun Stuff it could be anything, but usually ends up red with your own dwarf blood.

The visuals “lack information” required to make them realistic. It could be claimed that the mind takes in those visuals, if one has an imagination, and “fills in the blanks”. It cannot merely be nostalgia because this is a new game. It certainly helps that the pixel art in Pioneers is superb, making use of very few colours (FOUR!? That’s almost CGA!) to approximate a lot of images.

I’d argue that the only people that need (photo)-realism in their games are those that have no imagination. Sure, Far Cry 3 looks brilliant, but I haven’t had any fun playing it, even though the core shooting and stealth mechanics are both pretty good. Sapience by comparison sucked me in immediately and I’m absolutely desperate for more.

Thanks for the article and the comments, guys. This means a lot to me. I like how you are discussing the colors, it’s clearly the defining line for the look of the game and I’m glad I went with this style. It was a bit of a gamble (and a challenge) but I think it’s paid off. Having something to distinguish your game from numerous other games is important I think.

Back to the dev-cave!

P.S. Seven Cities of Gold is definitely very similar in theme, but I only found out about it afterwards. I’m more inspired by games like Colonization, Colorado and “Livingstone, I Presume” but also by books (both fictional and real) on explorers and that adventurous part history. Does anyone have any good book suggestions?

Oh god, your game remembers me so much of Seven Cities of Gold and especially Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. You didn’t need the four colors to distinguish your game, there is so few of these types of games ( a la Star Control 2, Starflight or Uncharted Waters). And better yet, it adds things (like seasons) to this rare genre. Thanks a lot for this game!

Any plans for the future? Planned features? (Also, sorry, I don’t have any good book recommendations. I can recommend games, though. Or archaeology books.)

The game desperately needs a fast forward button. You’re forced to either spend an eternity watching words slowly, ever so slowly appear on the letter one by one or to skip it and its contents in their entirety.

Likewise, with the dialogue bubbles. They persist for about 6x the time any able-minded man would require to read it and you can’t move to the next one, only skip the entire sequence. EDIT: No, can’t even skip them. Yeesh.

This game looks gorgeous. It’s like playing with an intricate needlepoint canvas hanging on my living room wall. There are so many little artistic touches every where you look. Colonization if they’d had 4x the pixels and 1/4 the colors.